I COULD HEAR THE SURF, taste the salt, smell the pungency
of seaweed and iodine even before we broke out of huckleberry
thickets to stand on the edge of the bluff overlooking the Pacific.
We scrambled down the steep bank and stepped out onto a long,
wide strand, utterly deserted except for sandpipers that ran along
the water's edge and gulls that wheeled screaming overhead.
Roger Allin, Superintendent of Olympic National Park in north
western Washington, looked around him with an almost fierce joy.
"If you have never believed in a Creator before," he said to me, "just
look around you now!" And indeed this wilderness beach seemed to
have been freshly minted by the hand of God.
We hiked to the south, along five and a half miles of that spume
sprayed shore. Most of the way we crunched over gravel, boulder
hopped, or teetered along driftwood logs that had washed up in
huge rafts. At one point we had to hurry around a headland to avoid
being trapped by the incoming tide-a predicament that has cost
Forever riding at
anchor, a flotilla of sea
stacks-ghosts of former
headlands sawed apart
by the surf-stands guard
where the green thumb of
Washington (opposite)
juts into the Pacific.